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nyerp
shawabawa3
> But you've GOT to improve the sharing feature. This is a great, accessible daily game. Connect it with Facebook, or at least give people something they can cut-and-paste without having to open an email client!
They're using the "Wordle" share method which worked insanely well, precisely due to the fact it didn't try to share with facebook or anything annoying, you just copy paste into an IM client
nyerp
That's not correct, based on my experience. Yes, you could copy-and-paste the "results" page, but that contains the answer, so it's no good for sharing. To get the actual "share" text (using Chrome on Windows 11), I had to open an email client when prompted and then cut-and-paste the text from the email the game created.
Jeremy1026
In wordle when I click the share button I get the green/yellow/black emojis copied to my clipboard showing how I did, but not my guesses were.
shawabawa3
weird, for me it copied the sharing text
llimllib
same on mac - I had to open it in Notes
danieltait
Thanks for the feedback! Have tried to improve now
danieltait
This was a really fun game to make.
We've been playing scrabble together for years so it's nice I'm finally competent enough to code this online version.
I posted it on reddit and now over 1000 people are playing against my dad everyday haha.
anentropic
It's nice!
My only gripe is: any time you click away from the tab, when you click back to it it resets the screen (shuffles the pile and clears any letters you had placed)
danieltait
Hmm yes ok I just removed the refresh now.
The reason it was there is some days I opened the tab on my iphone and for some reason it still showed the yesterdays result rather than the new day's letters.
Will have a think of a better way to force the refresh of the letters on a new day.
wizzwizz4
> The reason it was there is some days I opened the tab on my iphone and for some reason it still showed the yesterdays result rather than the new day's letters.
This'll be the Cache-Control header interacting with tab resume: rather than setting that to expire after X time has elapsed, set it to expire at time=T, and the browser will¹ fetch the new page instead. You'd increase the effectiveness of this technique (and reduce your bandwidth requirements for repeat players) if you made `/daily` a static page, and factored out those JavaScript variables into a separate file, fetched with `fetch` or `XMLHttpRequest` (or even a `<script>` tag, like `wordlist.js` is).
If I've configured my browser to behave otherwise (e.g. it takes me longer than a day to solve each puzzle), I really don't want it overriding that and resetting on me: that would make me very sad.
¹: usually. Firefox Session Restore behaves differently – but that's expected behaviour. Every website ever behaves like that: it's what I expect, because I expect to be able to close my browser and open it again and still have more-or-less the same pages available. After all, I've got a refresh button, but no un-refresh button.
jfindley
This is still happening btw - if I quickly switch to another tab it resets the board completely, giving me a different puzzle in practice mode. This makes it sadly unusable for me.
robertlagrant
setTimeout() with a timeout calculated to fire after midnight?
anentropic
A couple more ideas:
- could be nice to have it calculate and show the score of the word you have currently placed
- when you place a tile on the DL or TL you can't see where the DL and TL are any more (I think on Scrabble board they have little triangles that stick out past the edges?)
- I found myself wanting to know the 'target' score, but I guess that would change the experience a bit
danieltait
1. It shows the score just above the word if it is valid! 2. Yes agree thats a good idea. 3. I could add a new game mode where it shows you the target score, but I'm going to keep dad's score hidden for my own entertainment haha
TheHumanist
Could just do a minimal outer box shadow/glow around the tile in the color of the DL or TL to remind people where they are once letters are laid down.
Symbiote
It wasn't clear to me that I needed to start from the leftmost box.
JeanMarcS
Well, this is very frustrating. I really wanted to play, I like the idea of competiting with your dad. But as a non native english speaker, my vocabulary is too low to give me a chance. Anyway, great idea !
(I don't know if you are aware, but in French speaking countries, competition are mostly played this way, everyone with the same letters. At the end everybody got its own points and the best word is placed on the board)
danieltait
Send me a french dad and a french dictionary and I can add it this afternoon haha!
Wow no I didn't know that is how the french play. I believe it is a much fairer version of the game and better tests the players skill
playingalong
It's called Duplicate Scrabble: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate_Scrabble
erickhill
So are you like Desmond on LOST where every day, after you and your dad play, you have to run to the computer to type in the latest Dad-Word to keep the machine alive?
noduerme
Like, this is neat. And fun. Small, simple and chill.
So what I'm about to say is not specifically a knock against your game.
What I've noticed lately on HN is this weird split where everything has to either be super basic - like, this game could have been literally written with BASIC in 1984 - or else it has to be an abstract conversation about the future of AI. With very little in the middle.
What would be in the middle? I don't know, like, games that people spent a couple years making. Things with awesome graphics. Or small games that showcased interesting new game mechanics. The rise (resurrection?) of the one-shot HTML game, I get it, it's a rebuke of all the overly complicated stuff. Concept over execution. Wordle got bought up, right? But aren't we already on the long tail of that?
Again, this is not a knock - this would be fun to make in spare time, and it would be fun to play if I had spare time. I'm just wondering why there's this decisive move away from tacking up things that took a long time to make. And I'll be willing to sound bitter: For example, I posted a project here not too long ago that I worked on for a year. It was too complicated or posted at the wrong time. I have several others that are more sophisticated, that I know now are just too much for anyone here to look at and upvote.
On the other side, discussion (practically worship) of higher-level usage of enormously complicated things like GPT seem to drastically outpace discussion of the underlying mechanics.
If every little piece of code you put on the internet is a card trick (and it is) then this is a forum about magic, and we should stop being proud that we can do a trick, and start talking about how tricks work and how to make them better.
jstanley
I've noticed this as well, and not just on HN.
If you do a bit of knitting that is obviously an amateur's attempt, people will say "wow, so cool that you can knit". When you work hard and get better at knitting and you produce stuff that is so good that it's commercial-product quality, people will say "what's the point in spending all that time and effort when you can just buy one?". Only when you become so good at knitting that your output is of a quality that is not generally available commercially do people find it interesting again.
Replace "knitting" with anything you like: programming, painting, woodworking, welding, electronics, 3d printing, pottery, basket-weaving, card tricks, ...
People are interested in things that seem cute and homemade. They're interested in things that are better than anything they've seen before. They're not generally interested in the mediocre middle, even when it has been created by 1 person who spent a lot of time and tried hard, rather than by a faceless megacorporation.
EDIT: I think I did the faceless megacorporations a disservice there. Faceless megacorporations also make high quality products through the hard work of their employees, they just do such a great job, and they mass-produce so efficiently, that the products end up inconceivably cheap and we take them for granted.
bla3
It's also true when learning languages. If you speak a language a tiny bit, locals act politely impressed. If you speak it kind of good but aren't a native speaker, at least in some countries that lands much worse than speaking the language badly.
bryanrasmussen
if you speak the language like crap and they've never seen you before they think aww, this tourist really tries. When you speak kind of good they know you live there damn it!
astrange
The joke about Japan is that people will constantly tell you "nihongo jouzu" (your Japanese is good) when it isn't really. You know you're getting somewhere when they start correcting you. Although I don't think they'd get mad at you either way; maybe that'd happen at work or if you get something else cultural like body language wrong.
Having a bad accent might help you sound like an enthusiastic tourist though; Americans start off with pretty bad pronunciation, Spanish/Italian/Finnish are closer and people might think you're fluent.
ihappentobe
Mentioning “knitting” and etc. is interesting, and reminds me of a variation on this theme:
Browsing BoingBoing in the 2010s, the maker-themed posts that gained traction were projects that were essentially structured as: An over complicated _______ but it’s actually a simple ________. For example, ‘a 3d printed diy wrist mounted display that actually only shows yesterdays’ tweets”.
In some ways today’s pattern of projects being either very complicated or very simple is a distillation/separation of the earlier pattern.
Closi
I think we also enjoy playing with other peoples fun passion projects.
It’s different playing with something that someone built because they wanted to build it and it was fun, rather than them having some sense of commercial gain. See: indie games.
sour-taste
Maybe I can describe how I work and why sharing anything more than protoypes is hard, and then people can comment if this rings true to them.
Like many people here I have a full time job writing software. Most of the time I get home and don't really want to sit at a computer for a bunch more hours working on a side project. But a few times a year I get super inspired or have an acute need and will spend my spare time working on a game, or a small project or something like that. Inevitably I lose interest after reaching the 'alpha' phase of the project (or sometimes even failing to get there). At that point I sometimes want to share the project with others, but I won't usually continue working on it.
I think this may partially explain your experience.
dandellion
I think it's to be expected that the kind of projects you mention are rare. Consider that even if 80% of the people posting worked on games that take a couple of years to develop, and 20% worked on games that take one month, you'd still have a ratio of 6 short games posted for every single two-year project launched.
skrebbel
I think the abstract conversations about the future of AI are in the same ballpark as this. Thing is, there's only two kinds of makers you see on HN:
- People who make small simple things and put them on HN
- People who make bigger nontrivial stuff
The latter stuff also shows up on HN but less often because the amount of time spent making is so much more, like if something takes 3 years it's a single Show HN and if it takes a day to make it's also a single Show HN. Also note that a decent blog post takes about as long to make as a basic game, ie "thought leadership" is in box 1.
The people working at OpenAI and related are empathically not spending all their time doing Show HNs, nor even blogging on the AI future. They're actually making stuff, just like indie gamedevs or the average Microsoft employee. They're all in box 2.
Lots of people are doing nontrivial stuff all the time, but most of it isn't big enough for other people to write blog posts and huge HN comment threads about, yet also not small enough to make a new HN submission every few days.
cosmojg
You should check out https://lobster.rs! It's like HN if it were dedicated to the middle of that content distribution you describe. Nothing too simple, but nothing too abstract either.
candleknight
that link's broken, I think you meant https://lobste.rs/
tobr
There’s something pleasant about software that feels light and simple and does one thing well. Most software tends to grow to become perhaps more useful, but also complex and inelegant.
Not sure if that explains your observation or not, but at least it’s what attracts me to engage with a submission like this.
gowld
Same reason why there are so few mid-budget movies in Hollywood, and why medium size business either become giants or die.
Cheap stuff is easy to churn out -> low chance of success, x many shots
Expensive stuff costs a lot to be the best, and gets big payoff.
Middle-tier stuff costs too much for its benefits.
bmalicoat
I've noticed this too. It's mentioned in other comments below, but I definitely think it's easier to see the human behind something if it looks like a hobby project. I'm not sure what camp my games fall into, but I've had limited traction on HN, even though I'm just a lone human trying to hack it at full-time indie game dev.
Ironically I just launched a new word game today so we'll see if it makes the front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184884
PaulMest
I was a huge fan of Scrabble growing up. I like how simple this is and would probably be fun playing with my mom daily for a bit (similar to Wordle).
I like your game for what it is, but anchoring it to Scrabble confused me a bit when I first played. It was missing a couple of keys aspects for me:
1) Bingo bonus (+50 for using all of your tiles)
2) Optimizing your tileset so that future turns have a better chance for a bingo.
Also, minor nit: the colors for the letter multipliers (purple and red) in your game also confused me because in Scrabble the red x3 is a word multiplier and not a letter multiplier. You could consider using light blue and dark blue if you want to align to the traditional game.
FujiApple
This is great, good luck with the inevitable NYT buyout :)
One nit, the letters could snap the grid a bit more aggressive, I found I frequently had letter “miss” the grid and have to drag them again (on an iPad).
codethief
> This is great, good luck with the inevitable NYT buyout :)
How much do you think will his dad make at NYT?
Tade0
I can't hope to beat an experienced native speaker at this game, but it might be useful for expanding my vocabulary.
Case in point: my language doesn't really have a word for "almonry" - there's usually no dedicated space for collecting/dispensing alms.
By far the best Scrabble player I ever encountered was a former corporate drone in his 50s, who hiked 40km+ daily in the Carpathians and was in charge of maintaining a mountain shelter there.
When he wasn't out hiking, chopping wood or collecting water he would be sitting in the common room absolutely dominating the Scrabble board. I don't know his story and he didn't talk much about himself, but with age I increasingly get the appeal of such a life.
Symbiote
Without context, I doubt many native English speakers would know the meaning of "almonry".
From [1], they seem obsolete well before any colonization, so it's probably only British people with an interest in church history.
"Alms" is already fairly obscure, [2] puts it at word frequency 44625. Almonry is not in the top 333,333 words.
nebulous1
Be wary of the top answers it will give you. Quite a lot of the top answers will technically be words in English but are essentially completely unused and most people won't even know or understand them.
For instance, today's top words:
Obvert - I know this one but it isn't too common.
Overt - This was my answer, it's not uncommon.
Over - Common
Evo - I've never seen this used as a word other than a name.
Bevor - Apparently this is medieval neck armour. Uncommon.
Ouvert - From ballet according to the internet. Uncommon, although I know it as a French word.
Note this isn't the game's fault, they're all in the scrabble dictionary it's using. These words are only useful if you want to win scrabble, not if you want to speak English.
cdelsolar
I found obvert in the daily puzzles.. and tabanid in the practice puzzle. There's nothing wrong with learning "Scrabble" words.
danieltait
You can also play against an easier ai here - https://dadagrams.com/play
airza
It's missing the 50 point bonus for playing all 7 letters :(
dbg31415
It's really cute!
I'd change up the UX a bit.
1 - For the drag and drop, I'd keep the original letter in place, and just make the original slightly transparent as you drag. Reason being, as you drag on a phone you can't see the original letter since your finger is on it... so leaving the original as an indicator is good.
https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path...
2 - For the drag and drop, I would add a a "drop indicator" as you mouse over each square.
https://master--5fc05e08a4a65d0021ae0bf2.chromatic.com/?path...
3 - For things like "Triple Letter" I would change it up... "x3" -- I know you're going for "Scrabble" but frankly the text is a bit small for older people, who I think make up the "Dads" in your audience.
4 - Instead of "Delete" I would change the word to "Recall" for recalling letters you placed on the board.
5 - For the Colors I would go more vibrant.
6 - For font sizes, bigger is better. https://imgur.com/a/kduZzwl
7 - For buttons, I would suggest having different colors for different buttons. Having them all black means you have to read through them all... having one as a clear "primary" color helps.
GNOMES
Really fun! I beat your dad by 2 points lol.
Feature that is missing vs actually playing Scrabble is the ability to play a fake word if other players do not call you out on it.
I wonder if you could find a list of common misspelled words or fake words to allow, or could have some logic that compares the percentage word is misspelled by, and have the computer call it out as fake if it is over say 25% misspelled or something.
sverona
I have never met an AI that doesn't have the dictionary built in. If you want to play phonies check Woogles.
sebstefan
That's really fun, it's somehow totally doing something to know I'm in competition with someone's dad
Two suggestions, you need to put an actual URL in the "share" text in the clipboard. With https:// before the domain. It's so that people can click the link on instant messaging platforms for viral traffic
Then, I need some dad lore
netterminalgene
Dope game, turned it into a prompt, its been fun trying to optimize it.
You are a scrabble word master. The rules of the game are as follows. -- Create the highest scoring word you can with the 7 letters! The word must start in the first square of the board and be at least 2 letters long. 2x and 3x squares double and triple the value of that letter. The total points for your word will appear above a valid word.
The letters to point values are represented as a string where the point value follows the letter --- E1R1B3U1O1V4T1
The second square is 3x points, the fifth square is 2x points and the 7th square is 3x points.
The word must be a real english word. Lets think step by step.
m4tthumphrey
I just tried this and was blown away. Maybe I should start giving this ChatGPT some attention...
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Love it!! But you've GOT to improve the sharing feature. This is a great, accessible daily game. Connect it with Facebook, or at least give people something they can cut-and-paste without having to open an email client!
And the information you provide below is good (it provides a bit of "braggy" info without giving the answer away) but I would make it more conversational, e.g., "I beat Dad!" and then "I beat Dad again!" and then "I'm on a roll... I beat Dad 3 times in a row!" and add a call to action like "Can you beat Dad too? Try here: https://dadagrams.com".
The "Dad" emoji is chef's kiss. Definitely keep that in the share message.
For reference, here's the current share message (minus the great emoji, which apparently HN does not support):
#dadagrams14
Today: Won by 2 points
All time: Winning by 2 points
Daily streak: 1
https://dadagrams.com